Book: Son of Power

W >> Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost >> Son of Power




It was Carlin who helped Skag to a deep understanding of her old
friend, the Scot, and the famous bungalow in which he lived.

"It is 'papered' and carpeted and curtained with the skins of animals,
but you would have to know what the taking of those skins has meant to
the natives and how different it is from the usual hunter-man's house.
The M'Cord bungalow is a book of man-eater tales--with leather leaves."

Carlin, who had been one of M'Cord's favourites since she was a child,
saw the man with the magic of the native standpoint upon him. . . .
With all its richness there was nothing of the effect of the
taxidermist's shop about the place. Altogether the finest private set
of gun-racks Skag had looked upon was in the dim front hall. Bhanah
and Nels had a comfortable lodge to themselves, and there was a tiny
summerhouse at the far end of the lawn that had been an ideal of
Carlin's when she was small. The playhouse had but one door, which was
turned modestly away from the great Highway. It was vined and partly
sequestered in garden growths, its threshold to the west. The Scottish
bachelor had turned this little house over to the child Carlin years
ago, as eagerly as his entire establishment now. Yet the woman was no
less partial to the playhouse than the child had been.

. . . They hardly saw the Scot. In fact it was only a moment in the
station oval. Skag looked into a grey eye that seemed so steady as to
have a life all its own and apart, in the midst of a weathered
countenance both kindly and grim. . . . There was a tiny locked room
on the south side of the bungalow, vividly sunlit--a room which in
itself formed a cabinet for mounted cobras--eight or ten specimens with
marvellous bodies and patchy-looking heads. . . . The place was
heavily glazed, but not with windows that opened. Skag caught the hint
before Carlin spoke--that the display might have a queer attraction for
cobras that had not suffered the art of the taxidermist.

Skag turned to the girl as they stood together at the low heavy door,
leading into the library. Something in her face held him
utterly--something of wisdom, something of dread--if one could, imagine
a fear founded on knowledge. . . . A brilliant mid-afternoon. Bhanah
and Nels had gone to the stockades. Since the chase and rescue of
Carlin, Nels and the young elephant Gunpat Rao were becoming
friends--peculiar dignities and untellable reservations between
them--but undoubtedly friends.

There was a kind of stillness in the place and hour, as they stood
together, that made it seem they had never been alone before. Deep awe
had come to Skag. As he looked now upon her beauty and health and
courage, with eyes that saw another loveliness weaving all wonders
together--he knew a kind of bewildered revolt that life was actually
bounded by a mere few years; that it could be subject to change and
chance. Thus he learned what has come to many a man in the first hours
after bringing his great comrade home--that there must be some inner
fold of romance to make straight the insistent torture at the thought
of illness and accident and death itself--something somehow to enable a
man to transcend all three-score and ten affairs and know that birth
and death are mere hurdles for the runners of real romance.

. . . The sunlight brought out faint but marvellous gleamings from the
serpents. It was as if every scale had been a jewel. . . . Skag
looked closer. It wasn't bad mounting. It was really marvellous
mounting. His eye ran from one to another. Every cobra's head had
been shattered by a bullet. The broken tissues had been gathered
together, pieced and sewn--the art of the workman not covering the
dramatic effect entirely, yet smoothing the excess of the horror away.

". . . I've heard of cobras always, yet I never tire and never seem any
nearer them," Carlin was saying. "I remember the word _cobra_ when I
heard it the first time--almost the first memory. It never becomes
familiar. They are mysterious. One can never tell the why or when
about _them_. One never gets beyond the fascination. The more you
know the more you prepare for them in India. It's like this--any other
room would have windows that open. . . . Cobras have much fidelity.
We think of them as reptiles; and yet they are life-and-death-mates,
like the best of tiger pairs. One who kills a cobra must kill two or
look out--"

Carlin had strange lore about mated pairs; about moths and birds and
other creatures (as well as men-things) finding each other and living
and working together; about a tiger that had mourned for many seasons
alone, after some sportsman had killed his female; about another
rollicking young tiger pair that leaped an eight foot wall into a
native yard in early evening, made their kill together of a plump young
cow, and passed it up and over the wall between them.

"The cubs were hungry," Carlin had said.

Still they did not leave the door-way of the cobra room. Skag saw that
something more was coming. Once more he was drawn to the mystery of
the holy men by her tale:

". . . I was a little girl. It was here in Hurda. . . . I had strayed
away into the open jungle, not toward our monkey glen, but farther
south where the trees were scarce. . . . Of course I shouldn't have
been alone--"

Skag was staring straight at one of the cobras. Carlin turned and
placed her hand upon his sleeve. She knew that he was fighting that
old dread that had come upon him on the day of the elephant pursuit--a
dread well enough founded, grounded upon many tragedies--of the
pitfalls and menaces and miasmas of old Mother India; the infinite
variety, craft, swiftness and violence of her deaths. (White hands
were certainly clinging to Skag.) One's vast careless attitudes to
life are fearfully complicated when life means two and not the self
alone.

"This isn't a horrible story--" she said.

He cleared his throat; then laughed.

"I'll get past all this," he muttered. "Go on, Carlin--"

"I heard a step behind," she said. "It was my uncle--the most
wonderful of many uncles. I have not seen him since that day. He is a
little older than my eldest brother--possibly thirty at that
time--tall, dark, silent; a frowning man, but not to me. Even then he
belonged to one of the little brotherhoods of the Vindhas--lesser, you
know, in relation to the great brotherhoods of the Himalayas. In fact
it is from the Vindha Hills that they move on when they are called--up
the great way and beyond--"

Another of Carlin's themes--always the dream in her mind of climbing to
the heights.

"We walked on together through one of the paths--some time I will show
you. It was not like anyone else coming to find a child, or coming to
take it back. A most memorable thing to a little one, this elaborate
consideration from a great man. He did not suggest that I turn. He
made himself over to my adventure."

She waited for Skag to see more of the picture from her mind than her
words suggested:

"Ahead on the path--leisurely, like nothing else, a cobra reared, a
king cobra, as great as any of these. He barred our way. There comes
a penetrating cold from the first glance. It's like an icy lance to
the centre of consciousness. Then I felt the man's presence beside me.
My confidence was that which only a child can give. What the mind
knows and fears has too much dominion afterward. . . . The appalling
power and beauty of the cobra fascinated me. I have never quite
forgotten. There was a lolling trailing grace about the lifted length,
the head slightly inclined to us, the hood but partly spread--something
winged in the undulation, a suggestion of that which we could not see,
faintly like the whir of a humming bird's wings. That is it--an
intimation of forces we had not senses to register--also colours and
sounds! . . . My hand was lost in the great hand. My uncle did not
turn back. He was speaking. There was that about his tones which you
had to listen for--a low softness that you had to listen to get. Yes,
it was to the cobra that he spoke.

". . . There was never a poem to me like those words, but they did not
leave themselves in continuity. I could not say the sentences again.
I seem to remember the vibration--some sense of the mysterious, kindred
with all creatures--and a vast flung scroll of wisdom and poetry, as if
the serpents had been a great and glorious people of blinding,
incredible knowledges--never like us--but all the more marvellous for
their difference! . . . And the cobra hung there, his eyes darkening
under the gentleness of the voice--then reddening again like fanned
embers. . . .

"Then I heard my uncle ask to be permitted to pass, saying that he
brought no harm to the mother, undoubtedly near, nor to the baby
cobras--only good-will; but that it was not well for a man and a little
girl to be prevented from passing along a man-path. . . . It was only
a moment more that the way was held from us. There was no rising at
all, to fighting anger. A cobra doesn't, you know, until actual
attack. In leisurely undulations, he turned and entered the deeper
growths. A moment later my uncle pointed to the lifted head in the
shadows. One had need to be magic-eyed to see. We went on a little
way and walked back. It was not that we had to pass--but that we must
not be obstructed." . . .


This was the India that astonished Skag more than all hunter tales,
more than any hunter prowess; but there were always two sides. . . .
The weeks were unlike any others he had ever known. The mystery
deepened between him and Carlin. Almost the first he had heard of her
was that she was "unattainable"--yet _they_ had known each other at
once. . . . Still Carlin _was_ unattainable; forever above and beyond.
Such a woman is no sooner comprehended on one problem than she unfolds
another; much of man's growth is from one to another of her mysteries.
And always when he has passed one, he thinks all is known; and always
as another looms, he realises how little he knows after all. . . .

A thousand times Skag recalled the words of the learned man who had
spoken to Cadman and himself on their way to the grass jungle. "You
will acknowledge love, but you will not know love until it is revealed
by supreme danger. The way of your feet is in the ascending path.
Hold fast to the purposes of your own heart and you will come into the
heights."

Could Carlin be more to him than now? . . . Yes, she was more to-day
than yesterday. It would always be so. Love is always love, but it is
always different. . . . Sometimes he would stay away from the bungalow
for several hours. He was of a nature that could not be pleased with
himself when he gave way tumultuously to the thing he wanted--which was
continually to be in Carlin's presence. His every step in the
market-place, or in the bazaar, had its own twitch back toward Malcolm
M'Cord's bungalow; his every thought encountering a pressure of weight
to hurry home.

Carlin was full of deep joys of understanding. One did not have to
finish sentences for her. She meant India--its hidden wisdom. She had
the thing called education in great tiers and folds. Skag's education
was of the kind that accumulates when a man does not know he is being
educated. . . . Certainly Carlin was unattainable--this was an often
recurring thought as he learned Hindi from her and something of Urdu;
the usages of her world, its castes and cults.

Down in the unwalled city one mid-afternoon, he finished certain
errands and started for the bungalow. Had he let himself go, his feet
would have stormed along. He laughed at the joy of the thing; and he
had only been away since tiffin. Yet there was tension too--the old
mystery. A man cannot feel all still and calm and powerful, when there
has suddenly descended upon him realisation of all that can possibly
happen to take away one so much more important than one's own life as
to make contrast absurd. Skag was looking ahead into stark days, when
he would be called upon to take big journeys alone into the jungle for
the service. It was very clear there might be many weeks of separation
. . . and now it was only a matter of hours. He was nearing the little
gate. . . .

These are affairs men seldom speak about--seldom write; yet his
experience was one that a multitude of men have felt vaguely at least.
There was a laugh about it, a sense of self-deprecation; but above all,
Skag knew for the sake of the future that he must get himself better in
hand against this incredible pull to the place where she was. It
seemed quite enough to reach the compound or the grass plot and hear
her step.

She was not at the gate. He halted. Malcolm M'Cord was expected home
this day. He might have come. Surely he might give two such rare good
friends a chance to have a chat together . . . in Malcolm's own house,
too. Besides there was no better chance than now for a bit of moral
calisthenics. Skag turned back. No one was very near to note that he
was a bit pale. Still he was laughing. Even Nels, his Great Dane,
would have thought him weird, he reflected. Had Bhanah been along,
there could have been no possible explanation. . . . He was walking
toward the city, but his eyes were called back again. Carlin had come
to the gate. She held up her right arm full and straight--her signal
always, such an impulse of joy in it.

He waved and made a broken sort of gesture toward Hurda, as if he had
forgotten something. Minute by minute he fought them out after
that--sixty of them, ninety of them, good measure, sixty seconds each,
before he started at last to the bungalow again. The sun was low. The
bazaars were but a little distance back, when he met Bhanah and Nels
out for their evening exercise. . . . No, M'Cord-Sahib had not yet
come. . . . Yes, all was quite well with the Hakima, Hantee-Sahiba,
who was reading in the playhouse. . . .

Quite alone. Skag quickened, but repressed himself again. It was
business for contemplation--the way Bhanah had spoken of Carlin as
Hantee Sahiba, after her usual title. . . . He heard the birds. The
great Highway was deserted; the noise of the city all behind. . . . If
he had merely "acknowledged love" so far, as the learned man had
said--what must be the nature of the emotion that would reveal the full
secret to him? Always when his thoughts fled away like this, his steps
seized the advantage and he would find himself in full stride like a
man doing road-work for the ring.

She wasn't at the gate this time. Just now Skag felt the first
coolness of evening, the shadow of the great trees. . . . She did not
come to the gate. His hand touched its latch and still he had not
heard her voice. On the lawn path--in that strange lovely wash of
light--he stood, as the sun sank and the afterglow mounted. This was
always Carlin's hour to him--the magic moment of the afterglow. In
such an hour in the outer paths of the tree jungle, they had spoken
life to life.

"Malcolm M'Cord--is that you, Malcolm?"

Her voice was from the playhouse. It was steady but startling.
Something cold in it--very weary. Still he did not see her. The door
was on the western side.

Skag answered.

"Oh--" came from Carlin.

There was an instant intense silence; then he heard:

"Go into the house. I thought it was Malcolm. . . . I'll join you.
Don't come here--"

He turned obediently. He had the male's absurd sense of not belonging.
. . . He might at least be silent and do as she said. A keener gust
of reality then shot through him. His steps would not go on. She must
have heard his change from the gravel to the grass, for she called:

"It's all right, go right in--"

"But, Carlin--"

"Don't come here, dear! It's--not for you to see now!"

He halted, an indescribable chill upon him. The low threshold was in
sight, yet Carlin did not appear in the doorway. It was not more than
sixty feet away, across the lawn. It may have been something that she
had on. . . . A gold something. This came because of a fallen bit of
gold-brown tapestry on the threshold. It had folds. Out of the cone
of it, was a rising sheen like thin gold smoke. A fallen garment was
the first thing that came to Skag's mind, keyed to the suggestion of
some fabric which Carlin was to put on. The thing actually before his
eyes had not dislodged for an instant, the thought-picture in his mind.

Right then Skag made a mistake. He had not taken ten running steps
before he knew it, and halted. That which had been like rising gold
smoke was a hooded head--lifting just now, dilating. Already he knew,
almost fully, what the running had done. The thought of Carlin in the
playhouse had over-balanced his own genius. He walked forward now, for
the time not hearing Carlin's words from within. . . . The door was
open; the windows were screened. The girl was held within by the
coiled one on the stone. . . . She was imploring Skag to go back:

". . . to the house!" he heard at last. "Wait there--don't come! It
is death to come to me!"

He could not see her.

"Where are you standing, Carlin?"

"Far back--by the sewing machine! . . . Will you not--will you not,
for me?"

He spoke very coldly:

"While he watches me from the stone--you come forward slowly and shut
the door!"

"That would anger him into flying at you--"

Quite as slowly, his next words:

"I do not think he is angry with me--"

Yet Skag was not in utter truth right there, even in his own knowledge.
His voice did not carry conviction of truth. . . . The thing
unsteadied his concentration. The fact that he had started to run and
thus ruffled the cobra, was still upon him like shame. It reacted to
divide his forces now, at least to make tardier his self-command. Back
of everything--Carlin's danger. There was a quick turn of his eye for
a weapon, even as he heard a deep tone from Carlin--something immortal
in the resonance:

". . . You might save me . . . but, don't you see--I want you more!"

A _lakri_ of Bhanah's leaned against the playhouse at the side towards
the road.

The cobra had lifted himself erect upon his tail almost to the level of
Skag's eyes, hood spread. Carlin talked to him--low tones--no words
which she or Skag should know again. . . .

The _lakri_ was of iron-wood from the North, thick as the man's wrist
at the top. It pulled Skag's eye a second time. It meant the
surrender of his faith in his own free-handed powers to reach for the
_lakri_; it meant the fight to death. It meant he must disappear from
the cobra's eye an instant behind the playhouse. . . . Carlin's tones
were in the air. He could not live or breathe until the threshold was
clear--no concentration but that. . . . Like the last outburst before
a breaking heart, he heard:

"If you would only go--go, my dear!"

He had chosen--or the weakness for him. There was an instant--as his
hand closed upon the _lakri_, the corner of the playhouse wall shutting
him off from the cobra--an instant that was doom-long, age-long, long
enough for him to picture _in his own thoughts_ the king turning upon
the threshold--entering, rising before Carlin! . . . The threshold was
empty as he stepped back, but the cobra had not entered. Perturbed
that the man had vanished, he had slid down into the path to look.

Skag breathed. "And now if you will shut the door, Carlin--"

A great cry from Carlin answered.

Thick and viperine, the thing looked, as it hurled forward. It was
like the fling of a lash. Four feet away, Skag looked into the hooded
head poised to strike, the eyes flaming into an altogether different
dimension for battle.


The head played before him. The breadth of the hood alone held it at
all in the range of the human eye--so swift was the lateral vibration,
a sparring movement. The whole head seemed delicately veiled in a grey
magnetic haze. Its background was Carlin--standing on the threshold.

"I won't fail--if you stay there!" he called.

It was like a wraith that answered--again the old mystery, as if the
words came up from his own heart:

"I--shall--not--come--to--you--until--the--end!"

Skag was back in the indefinite past--all the dear hushed moments he
had ever known massed in her voice.

"Stay there--not nearer--and I can't fail!"

He was saying it like a song--his eyes not leaving the narrow veiled
head before him. It was like a brown sealed lily-bud of hardened
enamel, brown yet iridescent--set off by two jewels of flaming rose.
There was no haste. The king's mouth was not tight with strain. It
was the look of one certain of victory, certain from a life that knew
no failures--the look of one that had learned the hunt so well as to
make it play. . . .

The brown bud vanished. Skag struck at the same time. His _lakri_
touched the hood. With all his strength, though with a loose whipping
wrist, he had struck. The _lakri_ had touched the hood, but there was
no violence to the impact. . . . Carlin's love tones were in his
heart. Skag laughed.

The head went out of sight. Skag struck again. It was as if his
_lakri_ were caught in a swift hand and held for just the fraction of a
second. No force to the man's blow. The cobra was no nearer; no show
of haste. Skag's stick was a barrier of fury, yet twice the king
struck between . . . twice and again. Skag felt a laming blow upon a
muscle of his arm as from sharp knuckles.

And now they were fast at it. The man heard Carlin's cry but not the
words:

"Stay there!" he sang in answer. "Not nearer--just there and I can't
lose! . . . It isn't in the cards to lose, Carlin--"

Yet his mind knew he could not win. The cobra's head and hood recoiled
with each blow. It took Skag's highest speed--as an outfielder takes a
drive bare-handed, his hands giving with the ball. The head moved past
all swiftness, even the speed greatest swordsmen know. It was like
something that laughed. Before the whirring _lakri_, the cobra head
played like a flung veil between and through and around.

. . . So, for many seconds. The grey magnetic haze was a dirty brown
now. The man was seeing through blood. He could not make a blow tell.
He could not see Carlin. . . . She was not talking to him. . . . She
was calling upon some strange name. . . . His arm was numbed
again--like a blow from a leaden sling. There was a suffocating knot
in his throat and the smell of blood in his head . . . that old smell
of blood he had known when his father whipped him long ago. . . .

He tried to chop straight down to break in upon the king's rhythm. It
answered quicker than his thought. . . . Yes, it was Malcolm M'Cord,
she was calling. . . . He saw her like a ghost now. She was utterly
tall--her arms raised! . . . Then he heard a rifle crack--then a
breath of moisture upon his face--the sealed bud smashed before
him--the rest whipping the ground.


Skag went to Carlin who had fallen, but he was pulled off abruptly.

"I say, Lad, let me have a look at you. . . . The child's right
enough. Let her rest--"

The grim face was before him, two steady hands at work on him, pulling
back his collar, taking one of Skag's hands after another--looking even
between the fingers, feeling his thighs.

"I can't find that he cut you, Lad," he said gently.

Skag pushed him away. Carlin was moaning.

"I'm thinking your lad's sound, deerie," M'Cord called to her. "A
minute more, to be sure." . . .

He kept a trailing hold of Skag's wrist, staring a last minute in his
eyes.

No break anywhere in the younger man's flesh.


The afterglow was thickening. A servant came down the path to call
them to dinner. The servant had never seen such a spectacle--the
Hakima sitting with Hand-of-a-God and Son-of-Power, together--on the
lawn already wet with dew--their knees almost touching. . . .


"The like's not been known before, Lad--even of a man with a sword,"
Malcolm M'Cord was saying. "You must have stood up to him two minutes.
No swordsman has done as much. . . . And it was only a _lakri_ you
had--and a swordsman's blade goes soft and flat against a cobra's
scales! . . . You see, they take wings when the fighting rage flows
into them. It's like wings, sir. . . . Yes, you'll have a lame arm
where the hood grazed. It couldn't have been the drive of the head or
he would have bitten through--"

Even Skag, as he glanced into Carlin's face from time to time, forgot
that Hand-of-a-God had done it again--one more king cobra with a
patched |head and a life and death story to be added to the sunny
cabinet in the bungalow. . . . Carlin rose to lead them to dinner at
last, but Malcolm shook his head.

"On you go, you two. I'll sit out a bit in the lamplight, just here by
the playhouse door. . . . She'll be looking for him soon. . . . She
won't be far. She won't be long coming--to look for him. . . . She'd
find him and then set out to look for you, Lad."

The lights of the bungalow windows were like vague cloths upon the
lawn. . . . Carlin and Skag hadn't thought of dinner. They were in
the shadow of the deep verandah. Once Carlin whispered:

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